Add CEOs of major U.S. companies including General Electric, Alcoa, DuPont, Caterpillar, Lehman Brothers and Duke Energy to the list of supporters for caps that cut carbon and markets that make money. They made their formal announcement yesterday in Washington, D.C.
I think this represents a tipping point in the debate on climate change. Endorsement of a cap and trade system by these big employers supports what we here at Terra Rossa have said all along - a carbon market is the best way to solve our biggest problems while avoiding government’s worst ideas. The power of the marketplace should drive a solution to reducing carbon emissions - not new taxes or government hand-outs.
Here are some of the advantages of a carbon market - reducing our dependence on foreign oil, promoting our economic competitiveness, providing proper stewardship of creation, all in addition to addressing climate change.
Momentum is clearly building behind a carbon market and its power to help solve some of our nation’s most pressing problems of today. My fellow conservatives continue to give it a closer look.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 11:51 am and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Eco-Business Strategies, Oil and Gas . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I have been working with a company that is developing a new fuel cell and catatlyic reactor that uses ammonia for fuel. This system is completely carbon free and uses agricultural ammonia to produce hydrogen for the fuel cell. They have built several vehicles and stationary power systems that use this technology.
Ammonia is produced in large quantities as agricultural fertilizer so much of the production and delivery infrastructure is already in place. I feel that this project is worthy of consideration for a number of reasons.
For further information goto
http://www.electricauto.com
or
http://www.appoloengineering.com
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:39 pm
My question to Charles Ivie and all “new fuel” systems is what is the total cost, and especially what is the quantity of hydrocarbons spent, in producing fuel for this new technology.
As we have seen in hybrid cars, the fuel savings is nil. Cars only appear fuel conscious when the power is greatly reduced.
There are no natural source of hydrogen for fuel cells. The source for hydrogen has been hydrocarbons.
So what is the real cost of ammonia for the fuel cell, in dollars and barrels of oil?
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Mr. Eskew; Please explain to me why “caps that cut carbon” enter into any of this. Just another expression for “global warming” in my mind. And that is a totally unsettled question.
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
As Russ Frisinger points out the total end to end energy costs and residual production of chemical byproducts must be considered as part of the entire energy infrastructure. I am convinced that economies of scale will result in reduced carbon dioxide production where ammonia replaces hydrocarbon fuels. The industrial processes that provide millions of tons of agricultural ammonia are in place and are quite efficient in terms of energy consumption and product yield. These processes do require energy in the form of heat but this energy need not come from the combustion of hydrocarbons. An excellent review of the ammonia production process may be found at
http://www.ausetute.com.au/haberpro.html
In response to the Mr. Frank Trask’s question, we must be careful not to confuse the observations of global climate change with the notion that such changes are anthropogenic. Fossil evidence reveals that many dramatic climate extremes transpired long before man arrived on the scene.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:38 am
In response to Mr. Ivie’s comments, “and will continue to transpire long after man departs the scene.”
January 24th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I have said it before and I will say it again! The Republican “thumping” last November was not due to Jack Abramoff and corruption, it was not due to the GOP spending spree, it was not due even to the Iraq War. It was due to $3.00 a gallon gasoline. If the price of gasoline was back at $1.25 per gallon the GOP would have waltzed to victory again. Now, as President Bush begins to resemble Jimmy Carter, circa 1979, the Party will begin a long slide to oblivion and will take the country with it!
January 25th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
We experience global cooling from 1940 - 1970 while CO2 was rising. So I guess CO2 causes global cooling and warming. This is just bad science being dressed up for the government gravy train.
Bad science effectively caused DDT use to be banned in the 70’s and thus sentenced tens of millions of Africans to death and hundreds of millions to a disminished quality of life for years.
Oil is and will continue to be the cheapest, safest and simplest form of energy to fuel cars with until better batteries are invented (hopefully soon). We have enough for decades from its liquid form and centuries in the form of coal.
If you want to take CO2 out of the air why don’t you just do that ?
Plant more trees or build sequestering plants, either way we can reduce CO2 without giving up oil.
January 25th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
The origins of chaos theory are to be found in the efforts to predict the weather. Computer programs that struggle to forecast meteorological conditions over the next few days are trusted to predict global climate change over the next 50 years. The theories that predict global warming, or cooling, are based on controled laboratory experiments and mathematical models that are microscopic when compared to the theater of operations of global weather. When meteorololgists can predict the weather one week in the future with less than a ten percent error I might take the cataclysmic prognostications more seriously.
January 28th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Too many people mistake weather for climate, and argue from that mistaken perspective.